My adventures with One Note this evening

[johnnybregar]

Wow. I am totally confused about this and it should be really, really simple.

Here goes, hopefully someone can help me out.

Yesterday I worked from home and made a whole bunch of to do items in
OneNote (2007 on Vista) as well as typed a bunch of info and ideas. My
laptop syncs to a few notebook files on the network at work so I figured it
would be no big deal to add info to OneNote and then it would sync when I got
to work.

Once at work today, and in the meeting where I needed the info I had typed
yesterday, I looked and found that it was totally gone. OneNote had synced
up, and threw away what I had written yesterday and replaced it with files
from the day before that were on the network share. Ok. That's fantastic.
Thank you.

After work I tried to find the files that I had created. I looked all over
the place on my computer and finally figured out the Open Backup command from
the file menu. Great. Now I have the stuff that I wrote yesterday. So I
figured that I would just forget about the network sync thing and just save
the current notebooks (the ones without the additional info) into a new
notebook on my local machine, open them up, then copy in the new stuff and
I'd be good to go.

So I hit Save As on two of the notebook tabs. It saved them as .onepkg
files. Huh????? I tried to open one up and it gives me some BS about how it
was saved with an older version of OneNote and it can't open it with this
version. This is even better than I could have ever expected! So now I have
two of the four notebooks saved as .onepkg files which I cannot open and two
which I have not saved as anything yet. And I have a bunch of backup
sections that I created with new info on them that I can't figure out what to
do with. And I have the notebooks at work that are two days old and I can
sync back to if I need to.

Anyone care to help me sort this out? If you're in Seattle, I'd happily buy
you a beer. Or three. I would very simply like to do the following three
things:

1. Make sync really sync. Don't overwrite work that I've done on my local
machine - add it to the network shared files.

2. Figure out how to save a notebook as a notebook file that I can simply
open up in OneNote and not have a compressed archive (why invent a brand new
proprietary compression format????)

3. Somehow get the old and new files merged together nicely so I can get on
with work and stop typing desperately for help.

Cheers,

jb

 

[kboeds]

Johnny
I'm going to be watching this question. I am trying to get my employer to
buy in to One Note for our office and it is problems like this that my boss
wants me to test before she is willing to purchase the product. I will
definately be doing a lot of work from home that will need to be sync(ed)
when I get back to work.
We have older versions of everything there then I have at home. So far I
have not had an issue with other office products but what you are discribing
could be a big problem for me.

Thanks for asking the question sorry I couldn't be the one to answer if for
you. Still in beta mode here.

 

[johnnybregar]

This is quite possibly not an issue that most people have, hopefully it will
be easy to spot where I went wrong.

In general, aside from figuring out this issue, I have had great luck with
OneNote. It's very handy and integrates well with Outlook.

jb

 

[michtho_ms]

Hi Johnny - I had a few questions for you:

1) How are your roaming notebooks set up? How exactly did you set them up?
Windows has a caching mechanism that sometimes fights with OneNote's caching
mechanism. The Windows cache can also get out of sync and make you think
that your files are gone when they are actually still there.
2) Is your OS at work WinXP or Vista?
3) Do you have older OneNote 2003 files in your notebook that have never
been upgraded?

As far as the saving as a .ONEPKG, this format allows someone to "Pack" up
an entire set of sections or a notebook into one file for easy distribution.
Basically a OneNote zip file. But by default, when you choose "Save As",
OneNote defaults the Save path to a OneNote section, which is just a regular
".ONE" OneNote file that can be opened right back up. To save as a package a
user has to explcitly set it to .ONEPKG. It's hard to tell exactly what
happened but one possibility is that you inadvertantly packaged up old
OneNote files with new ones into a .ONEPKG via our save dialog. Either way,
your OneNote experience seems poor. If you'd be willing to share youre notes
with the OneNote team, you can go to:
http://connect.microsoft.com/onenote to file a bug and attach your wacky
notebook package. Then we can take a look at it to see what went wrong.

thanks
-mike

 

[johnnybregar]

Hi Mike,

Do you work at MS? I do. You can search for my name in the address book
(Johnny Bregar) and if you want, I can actually bring my laptop to the team
and they can see what I did first hand...

I don't think there are any older 2003 files here.

I am running everything off of the same machine at the moment - one Lenovo
laptop running Vista. The shared files are located on one of our network
shares. I had planned to sync them back and forth from my desktop to the
laptop, but haven't actually gotten around to getting my desktop set up and
pointing to the OneNote shared files.

When I clicked Save As, it defaulted to the onepkg format. There are other
options, which I tried. But I was unable to open them too.

jb